Deschutes River (Lower): Warm Springs to Columbia River

Deschutes River (OR) – Trip Report – Warm Springs to Heritage Landing

This was a private trip but sharing our logistics and river times here since I had a hard time finding trip reports covering the full stretch from WS to HL.

We hired Linda’s River Shuttles to move our car from the Warm Springs Boat Launch.  No issues, and to the contrary they were communicative and great to work with.  Would recommend.

Between the BLM maps and the American Whitewater info you have all the info you need about locations of rapids and campsites and toilets and such.

 

Party – 5 total, all on open model (no spray skirt) packrafts.  Two were probably best described as “beginnermediates” with some formal training and experience on other longer river trips like the Rio la Venta in Mexico.  The other three were newer or new to packrafting, though one read the Packrafting Handbook front to back in preparation for this trip – and it showed!  Can’t recommend the book enough.

Dates – 7/14/25 – 7/17/25.  Guage at Maupin was reading 4140 CFS on the day we put in.

Day 1 – arrived to Warm Springs Boat Launch ~9 A.  Put in at 10 A.  Floated ~24 miles to the Davidson Flats Camp.  Scouted Whitehorse, which was fine.  Had one swimmer on the day.  7 hours from car to camp, including our breaks.

Day 2 – hard day moving ~ 34 river miles from Davidson Flats to the vicinity of Pine Tree Rec site.  We portaged the Class IV Oak Creek rapid, which was an easy portage.  We also portaged from Sandy Beach to Buckhollow to get around Sherar’s Falls.  ~3 mile walk that we did in an hour.  This stretch had some of the more active rapids.  We had something like 8 swimmers over the 10 rapids.  All recovered without event since there’s generally good runout after any rapid.  This ended up being a 12 hour day, including our breaks and the portages.  The main reason we pushed for a longer day was to get the longer portage done with.

 

Day 3 – we had an easy day moving ~30 miles to Green Hole Camp.  One swimmer in the first rapid, otherwise the day was without event and the water kept us moving.  ~7 hour day, stopping at 3p.  We treated ourselves to a lazy afternoon at camp since we were ahead of schedule and making good time and it was a vacation too.  We also wanted to be rested for the rapids at the end of the river, due in part to the humbling day 2.

 

Day 4 - ~11 miles from Green Hold Camp to Heritage Landing.  By now we were more dialed and scouting rapids efficiently.  The scouting helped our team a lot.  The Class III rapids felt easy, due in part to understanding what to avoid.  4 hours camp to car, including the scouting.

 

Overall I thought this was a great trip.  There are a lot of rad campsites.  The scenery was more varied than I expected.  We saw lots of varied wildlife.